🖼️Curated, By Whom?

Issue #19

It was with a friend who was an amazing artist. He met a graffiti artist looking for a place to show his work. We put it together, and it was a hit! It ran for months. It did well enough that the gallery continued showing different styles from other artists.

Later, on my own, I got two of my paintings of trees into a gallery in Louisiana. It’s fair to say I’m pretty familiar with art.

So when I say I know what "curated" can cost a show, I'm not being coy about it. I've stood in a room deciding what goes on a wall and what doesn't, and lived with the doubt of it either way.

This ‘curated’ trend took me a second to understand what was happening with the word. A curated skincare fridge (yes, that’s a thing). A curated shop drop. A curated grocery aisle. A subscription box.

I didn't disagree with it, exactly; I just didn't know what it meant anymore.

Here's what curation actually requires: expertise, rejection, and someone willing to be wrong in public. A curator's whole value is what they left out. That's the job.

Here's what "curated" came to mean in a product description: Here, we picked some stuff.

I think a word that sounded expensive got picked up by some people who needed things to sound expensive.

"Curated" is what "recommended" and "suggested" turned into once companies figured out the old words weren't working hard enough. A recommendation sounds like a guess. A suggestion sounds optional. Oh, but curated — curated sounds like someone with taste and pinky’s out stood between you and a very bad mistake and said, “Indubitably, that is not in your best interest, good sir.”

It doesn't say "we think you'll like this." It says "we already decided you want this," and it cloaks that decision as expertise instead of what it actually is, which is a sales mechanism.

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it.

That’s what this newsletter delivers.

The Marketing Millennials is a look inside what’s working right now for other marketers. No theory. No fluff. Just real insights and ideas you can actually use—from marketers who’ve been there, done that, and are sharing the playbook.

Every newsletter is written by Daniel Murray, a marketer obsessed with what goes into great marketing. Expect fresh takes, hot topics, and the kind of stuff you’ll want to steal for your next campaign.

Because marketing shouldn’t feel like guesswork. And you shouldn’t have to dig for the good stuff.

Sign Up Free

My favorite version of this is the "algorithm-curated" playlist.

A curator's whole job is a human being willing to be wrong in public. It’s a cultural expertise and a deep critique of what’s actually good, or not. An algorithm can’t do that; it can only calculate. Nobody curated your playlist. A program recommended it to you and hoped you wouldn't notice the difference.

Thankfully, this buzzword has died down some, which feels right. Words like this don't retire; they just quietly stop landing, the way a joke does once everyone's heard it. Yet somewhere there's still a product page calling a warehouse pick "hand-curated," banking on you not asking by whose hands, if any one, exactly.

I'm not mad at it, per se, just someone who's actually stood in the gallery, watching a word I used to respect get put to work selling things it never touched and never will.

Till next Wednesday — well, Friday this time,
~Aliya

P.S. Did you know you can read this newsletter online? Click the link at the top right to read online and see past issues.

P.P.S. You don’t have to be in marketing to love this newsletter. Click here to share.